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wlan

Atheros launches new energy-efficient WLAN chip for mobile devices

Your mobile devices' wireless LAN is about to get significantly better.

Atheros, a mobile Wireless LAN (WLAN) chip maker, announced Monday the lauch of its newest and possibly the industry's highest performance mobile WLAN chip, the the ROCm single-chip 11n AR6003 family.

According to Atheros, this tiny new chip, currently the smallest WLAN chip on the market, measuring just a 5mm by 5mm, combines both the energy efficiency of Atheros' ROCm technology and the faster 802.11n WLAN performance. As a result, it offers up to 85Mbps of actual throughput speed in the 5GHz band and 48Mbps in the … Read more

Cisco wireless LANs at risk of attack, 'skyjacking'

Cisco Systems wireless local area network equipment used by many corporations around the world is at risk of being used in denial-of-service attacks and data theft, according to a company that offers protection for WLANs.

Researchers at AirMagnet, which makes intrusion-detection systems for WLANs, discovered the vulnerability, which affects all lightweight Cisco wireless access points, as well as the exploit that could be used against networks that have the Over-the-Air-Provisioning (OTAP) feature turned on.

"We found it in our labs," Wade Williamson, director of product management at AirMagnet, said on Monday. "We don't know about it … Read more

Meraki unveils new enterprise wireless networking solution

Known for offering one of the biggest wireless mesh networks for regular hot spot users and being the first that brought Wireless-N to the outdoors, Meraki on Monday showed that it can also mean serious business with its new enterprise class wireless local area network (WLAN) solutions.

WLAN is nothing new. Buy a wireless router to set up at home and you have one. However, it's a lot more complicated and expensive when it comes to the enterprise-class WLAN, where both large coverage and high performance are needed.

What Meraki introduced offers just that, plus lower price points. For … Read more

The rise of wireless 2.0

Transition and evolution are a constant in the tech industry as niche products evolve into enterprise infrastructure. This is exactly what's happening with wireless local area networks (WLANs) in large organizations.

It first started awhile back with a few wireless access points in conference rooms. Intel's Centrino processor led to lots more laptops and thus lots more access points. This in turn led to the need for more wireless network management, security, and administrative tools.

All of these things have come to pass and now we are looking at enterprise-wide WLAN deployment, especially in industries such as education, … Read more

Skype on a cell phone

Nokia has signed a partnership with Skype to offer Internet calling for its new N800 Internet Tablet smart phone.

While the phone will be immediately available in the U.S. and some European countries, Nokia announced Monday at CES, the Skype service will not be available until June. People can stay connected until then with the N800's instant messaging feature over WLAN, in addition to regular cell phone calls.

The N800 smart phone has 128MB RAM and 256MB of flash memory with two memory cards slots that will each take SD, MicroSD, MiniSD, MMC and RS-MMC cards of up … Read more